UNLABELLED : We examine the impact of Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding on wait times and patient outcomes using a unique cross section of about 32,000 patients for an ED located in the Southwestern United States. We construct a measure of a patient's outcome and estimate the extent to which it is worsened by long waits in the ED. We find that waiting at an ED due to overcrowding tends to ...

This paper studies the optimal choice of home equity release products. The decision problem of a retiring couple is modeled that holds the major fraction of their wealth as home equity and faces longevity, long-term care, house price, and interest rate risk. The couple can choose to buy annuities, long-term care insurance, and to borrow against the home using different equity release products. ...

In this paper we study approximating the total loss associated with the individual insurance risk model by a compound Poisson random variable. By minimizing the expectation of the absolute deviation of the compound Poisson random variable from the true total loss, we investigate not only the optimal compound Poisson random variable but also the numerical calculation of the approximation error. ...

This paper examines transition in the level of competition in the Japanese life insurance industry over the last ten years. We estimate the first order condition for profit maximizing insurance oligopolies to obtain the degree of non-competition and collusion. Estimation results suggest: 1) mutual companies, like stock companies, seek to maximize their own profits rather than pay out dividends ...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side, it would facilitate the adoption of more incentive-compatible insurance contracts, for example throu...

This paper proposes a model in which bank runs are closely related to the state of the business cycle. The benchmark model shows that, in a market economy, there are welfare losses due to the existence of bank runs. Extensions of the model explore the welfare effects of various government policies. The results suggest that an interest-cap deposit insurance scheme is an efficient policy to preve...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...

Informal care is a vital pillar of the British welfare state. A well-known fact in the small economic literature on informal care is the apparent negative relation between care responsibilities and labour market participation. Yet, caring and labour market participation may be endogenous. Using an instrumental variable approach and panel data techniques and employing data from the British House...

Pension Design with a Large Informal Labor Market: Evidence from Chile This paper investigates empirically the fiscal and welfare trade-offs involved in designing a pension system when workers can avoid participation by working informally. A dynamic behavioral model captures a household’s labor supply, formal/informal sector choice and saving decisions under the rules of Chile’s canonical priva...